- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 13:25:57 -0400 (EDT)
- To: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- cc: au <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>
Invalid documents are a basic problem in terms of how a browser should deal with them. They are a particular problem for authoring tools, since if a document is invalid (according to whatever its grammar is) a tool can not have any good way of dealing with it - either it retains the invalid markup, which as Bruce has pointed out in conference calls is extremely difficult in practice (unless it is a failure of that tool, which could more easily be rectified by the tool producing markup valid to a scheme specified by the tool...) or it throws out everything which is not valid, which may result in a loss of accessibility becuase the tool is not aware of some wonderful new piece of markup. As an example, consider the RUBY element being developed by i18n [1], and how a tool shold deal with taking one part of it to place it somewhere else. If the tool produces a document which can be validated to a published grammar (P2 requirement from WCAG, and therefore inherited already as a P2) then it can be dealt with. If it doesn't, then it has to make an arbitrary decision about how to deal with a piece of markup it doesn't understand. The grammar need not be a W3C specification, but it must be available for tools to check against. See 2.5.1 in the current draft [2] [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-ruby [2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/WAI-AUTOOLS-19990421 Charles McCN On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, William Loughborough wrote: I guess the distinction is between documents that are "valid" (presumably meaning validatable according to some W3C validator) and those that are accessible. If this is just about the former then P2 seems OK because it's possible to have an accessible but invalid document and that's not a P1 level problem. -- Love. ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE http://dicomp.pair.com --Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA
Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 13:26:00 UTC